Pornography and Research

The Greek linguistic roots of the English word pornography essentially refer to the written reportage (grahpy) of prostitutes (porno) on their work. If the scholarly investigation of pornography and related cultural phenomena is to have any value today, the absolutely crucial issues clustered here must be appropriately remembered.

Today’s English word and concept “pornography” seem essentially to have come into being in tandem with modern print technologies for the dissemination of writing, and the modern industrial period more generally, which produced print as a harbinger of today’s mass media. Given its historical connections to reportage on acts of prostitution in one medium or another, pornography is, at root, a technological concept. It has to do with the potential publicization, in mass-mediated form, of otherwise fundamentally private (or even secret) sexual encounters. In this regard, pornography is a modern form of gossip and a technologized version of “kiss and tell.”

It is also deeply conceptually entangled with prostitution. Pornography demands being taken as a newer form of prostitution, or at least as a logical extension of it. The session between sex worker and client, maybe more than the sex act per se, is its paradigm case for intimacy—and for the social event in general. As in prostitution, in pornography, money as well as other potential compensatory provisions replace at least some of the human goods and services that are taken to be exchanged in “regular” sexual transactions. With pornography, the act of recording this—along with potential dissemination of this documentation/reportage—enters the economy of sexual exchange as well. Secondary markets are simultaneously created, via which traces of these original events can also be sold to further classes of witnesses in order to maximize the profits potentially made by any single act of commercialized sex. This entry examines the contemporary implications of historical definitions of pornography, research approaches to pornography, and the influence of media effects and so-called antipornography feminist theories on understandings of the topic. This entry concludes by discussing two key critical works on pornography: Linda Williams’ Hard Core: Power, Please and “the Frenzy of the Visible” and Laura Kipnis’ Bound and Gagged.